The Fruit of Stone

This is a beautifully written book that explores love and friendship in a creative and surprising storyline. It made me laugh out loud several times and read sections aloud to my wife repeatedly. The wordcraft is wonderful. While there are some things this book that one can question, that seems to miss the point. Mr. Spragg wasn't following my idea of what should make perfect sense or what he should explain. Rather he wrote the story he wanted to tell. I absolutely loved reading it. His character development, dialog and sense of place are exceptional. When the wind changes and the storm blows in and then the rain changes to hail - I was back there again myself, listening to "the sharp snare-drum shatter of the ice pellets against the truck's hood and roof."

I read a lot. But I often don't take the time to write reviews. Having just finished Mark Spragg's, The Fruit of Stone I am compelled to review it because his novel burrowed itself into my soul in a way that no other book has since reading The Boy and the Dog are Sleeping. The Boy and the Dog are Sleeping is a better book because it is a memoir, a real story about love spilling out over life like a rain- swollen stream that has crested far above its banks spreads out over the land. The Fruit of Stone is fiction, so it's not as amazing. But it has that same spirit of hope rising out of miserable circumstances. And the hope, in its quiet, yet muscular way is convincing Other reviewers have given the outlines of the plot, but even if they hadn't, I wouldn't. The plot, though engaging, is not the heart of the story. It's simply the skeleton to support the muscle and sinew of a story about what it means to love. To love family, to love romantically, to love in friendship, and to love in empathy, despite severe shortcomings, stretched circumstances, and broken people. McEban, the central character who tells his story, portrays love in all its guises and in a way that lets you see that love is about giving more than getting, though getting comes from the giving. This is not an easy read. People hurt and are hurt, injure and are injured. Sometimes gravely sometimes not so gravely. Sometimes they have it coming. Sometimes not. Many times life gets away from them. But then it comes back because they let it... or they decide they'd rather not. In the end, McEban comes through in a way you knew he would. But it feels surreal and right, a resting place after a long journey, not the syrupy end that it could be. The Chicago Tribune writer whose quote is on the front of the book nailed it, writing, "Achingly beautiful."

I rated this a 4.5 and then rounded up to 5 stars. The book is a good read, but it should probably come with instructions: "Some Assembly Required." It's structured as a kind of picaresque novel, two men in a pickup (with a horse and a dog) traveling over Wyoming and some other western states in pursuit of a wife who has left home. Along the way, they are joined by a young Native American woman and a boy. This story is intercut with flashbacks to the boyhood and early youth of one of the men. And each section of the novel ends with a surreal dream sequence. How all these pieces fit together is kind of up to the reader. There's material here that you'll find in the author's "Where Rivers Change Direction" and in his film script for "Everything That Rises" -- a rancher father and son, a man whose parents died when he was young, an old wise bachelor cowboy, the Wyoming landscape, the turn of seasons, horses, ranch work, accidents and injuries. And as in both those other works, Spragg reveals his wonderful gift for revealing character through dialogue. The book is worth reading just for how people talk to each other in a wry, ironic, self-deprecating way. And the precision in his observations of human behavior and the outdoors is in top form.Compared to the thoughtful, interior quality of Spragg's essays, which really get you inside the mind of the writer, the novel is more cinematic. It gives vivid images of surfaces, and the inner life and motivations of the characters have to be surmised from their behavior, which is often quirky, impulsive, and upredictable. A rancher's wife loses her mind and disappears, the rancher commits suicide, a woman believes she is accompanied by a dead sister, a park ranger is attacked and left unconscious in a culvert, a man enters a convenience store and aims a rifle at the cashier. These things happen with little explanation, and the central character seems to feel that none is needed. I also found myself wanting a more inward look to understand the two middle-aged friends at the center of the story, who happen to love the same woman. Still and all, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in modern-day western literature and first-rate writing. When Spragg is at his best, he's right on the money -- a man with too much to drink roping road signs from the back of a truck, a woman dying of cancer, the step-by-step process of replacing a corner post in a corral fence, the heat and dust behind the chutes at a rodeo, a boy caring for a friend with a broken foot in a snowstorm. As a companion, readers of this book would be interested in Gretel Ehrlich's novel "Heart Mountain". Set during the 1940s, it involves a similar love-struck bachelor cowboy living alone on a Wyoming ranch.

Mark Spragg tells a good story populated with characters who make you want to know them -- to work with them and to drink cold beer with them after the work is done, as if they were about the most interesting friends you could ever hope to find. Spragg's characters are ranchers and stockmen and the wives and children of ranchers and stockmen, making their way through life in the high grasslands paradise of Wyoming. People, place, and the details of actual ranch life are braided into a hard-twist narrative with prose that can make you weep. Mark Spragg writes beautifully -- no other way to say it. The language seems to lope down the page, the horses and cattle to move in real sunlight hazed in the mist of their own rising dust. Page after page, it all just seems so exactly right.

In his 2nd book and first novel, Fruit of Stone, Mark Spragg continues to use his considerable skills to define the men, women and the landscape of the West with a narrative that takes the reader on an unusual quest filled with unexpected twists and rich returns. .Spragg, a writer with a keen awareness of word sentence balance is also an extraordinary storyteller. The characters in this book are vividly, boldly, and yet tenderly drawn. They captivate the reader. Each character is well developed and clearly defined with the exception of the woman who motivates the central action of the novel, the quest; she is ephemeral, sylph-like, enigmatic, and thus fascinating. She lures, beckons and frustrates both the reader and the protagonist. Gretchen carries Milton in her book bag, but it is the poet John Keats' ballad "Belle Dame sans Merci" which best describes her. She is the beautiful woman without mercy.In the current literary landscape littered with drugstore cowboys, Mark Spragg's, McEban stands out as the genuine article as we follow him and his best friend Bennett through the mountains and plains of Wyoming and Montana, back to Wyoming and into Nebraska, an illusive Gretchen ever alluring, ever beckoning, In the loneliness of the harsh plains and the high mountains of Wyoming the ability to trust a friend can and often does determine the survival of an individual. Spragg's cleanly drawn protagonist, rancher McEban and his best friend Bennett enjoy such a relationship.This is a fine, rich western novel. It would be a mistake to dismiss Mark Spragg as merely a regional writer. His characters speak for the West as William Faulkner's speak for the South.